Healthy Seniors

What Works for Some

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

I am just going to go ahead and post this, rather than going back and forth over what a weird preoccupation it is. It’s more chatter about the quaint and quirky low-carb diet, whether you call it ketogenic, keto, carnivore—they’re all variations on the same theme.

It’s been a thing for me in recent weeks and months, with greater and lesser intensity: because of helping elderly family, some with chronic health issues. Because I’ve done a “n of one” experiment (n=1, as they say) in which you try something on yourself to see what the results are, I know there are unexpected benefits of the diet to how I feel—I can’t say what others might find. Therefore, it seems obvious to me that others should also try changing their diets radically to enjoy the benefits, but if I’m honest, I know nothing of the sort.

So rather than trying to explain it myself further, here’s a discussion between a young lady who’s been on the strict carnivore diet—the diet that restricts carbohydrate consumption the most—for some 16 years and a man who has set up nursing homes with a care program that largely (not exclusively) follows the low-carb diet program in different forms. I give you Kelly Hogan (podcast host) and Hal Cranmer (nursing home provider):

Kelly has experienced long-term relief of long-term health issues by adopting this restrictive, high-fat, all meat diet. Hal has experienced nursing home patients whose long-term health problems have cleared up, including a couple of cases where nursing home patients with severe dementia have left his facilities and gone back to live at home unassisted because the “Alzheimer’s” has gone away with the discontinuation of all the sweets and breads and pastas.

Something is definitely going on here—something that our health care system with its monomaniacal focus on prescribing and selling pharmaceuticals is completely blind to.

It’s a long video. But it contains a lot of anecdotal detail, too. Somewhat less than a book, something more than a long article.

I’m presenting it here because I can’t present it anywhere else that could possibly make a difference to the people close to me. They tend to look at me like a person who suffers from having a flower pot for a head, out of which is growing a mysterious form of an invasive toxic plant.

One detail mentioned in the discussion is real: It sounds daunting to change one’s diet so radically. It’s true. As I try to point out, a person can try it for a week and then quit again if there’s no discernible benefit. Taking it as a limited day-by-day challenge makes it workable.

That’s different from the pharmaceutical approach: That’s not something you can say about prescription drugs. You can’t do n=1 experiments on yourself with prescription meds and casually toss them aside after a few days or weeks if you find no benefit. After all, they’re often prescribed to change markers found in blood or urine tests, maybe x-rays—but not just your general sense of wellbeing.

The video didn’t have anything to say about the subject of statins. But in another discussion with a couple other low-carb types, the one person who used to teach physicians in med school said that for all the talk about how statins should be prescribed to prevent heart attacks, very few people who are hospitalized for myocardial infarctions are found to have had them due to high cholesterol. Why does the health system think everyone should be on statins? I would guess it’s path dependence, by and large, and the blindness caused by decades of singular focus on blood serum cholesterol levels. Serum cholesterol isn’t something you feel, after all. People don’t typically report feeling so much better now that their LDL levels are in the AMA-endorsed range.

But what do I know? All I know is that I feel better after changing my diet, and I’m hoping it continues to be as simple as that.